MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History Summer 2021

opening round

In 1784, Henry Shrapnel, a 23-year-old lieutenant in the British Army’s Royal Artillery, began working on a new type of ammunition that in time would revolutionize warfare and enshrine him in the annals of military history. Three years later he successfully demonstrated his “spherical case shot,” which he intended to be used as an antipersonnel weapon, at the British fortress of Gibraltar. Shrapnel had essentially married the canister shot, in use since the 1400s, with the delayed-action fuze, allowing an artillery shell to be fired intact into enemy positions, where it would detonate and explode in midair, showering debris at a high velocity in front of—or above the heads of—the enemy’s troops. Shrapnel’s invention more than tripled the effective range of canister shot (from about 1,000 feet to more than 3,500…

flashback

TOMB OF TUTANKHAMUN, EGYPT, 1922 British archaeologist Howard Carter discovers the intact tomb of King Tutankhamun of Egypt. It contains more than 50,000 artifacts, including the pharaoh’s war shield. TODAY: The Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo announces that it has been able to restore the shield, which had suffered extensive damage since its discovery nearly a century ago. DENTS RUN, PENNSYLVANIA, 1863 According to legend, a Union army wagon train carrying 52 bars of gold, each weighing 50 pounds, is either lost or stolen as it makes its way to the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. TODAY: Lawyers for a father-son team of treasure hunters obtain documents confirming that the FBI dug up a remote site in Elk County in 2018 in search of the fabled gold. SPANISH CIVIL WAR, 1936 The Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco,…

reality checks

Posed Mortem The Spring 2021 edition of MHQ was splendid. MHQ is my flagship military magazine; I only wish that it were published monthly. My comment addresses the photograph on the cover of the magazine, which depicts members of the U.S. Army’s 79th Infantry Division battling to capture Cherbourg. While the photo purports to show soldiers actively engaged in combat, I believe that it was hastily posed. The first tipoff is the GI who’s directly behind the Browning heavy machine-gunner. The muzzle of his M1 Garand is just to the left of the machine-gunner’s head, which in the midst of actual battle would have endangered his comrade. The machine-gunner is also in a combat posture, and on the ground to his left are some spent shell casings. The Browning, however, ejects casings…

shock treatment

Who coined the term “shell shock?” Blake Anderson St. Petersburg, Florida Mental impairment from sustained exposure to artillery is probably as old as gunpowder in siege warfare, though for centuries the condition was all too frequently dismissed as a loss of “moral fiber.” As early as 1914, however, doctors tending to soldiers in the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium and France began to notice many of them behaving as if they had suffered head wounds in spite of the absence of such injuries. Cases of panic, flight, inability to reason, and the inability to walk or think seemed to defy conventional wisdom regarding either head injuries or a loss of “moral fiber.” From what he observed, British psychologist Charles Samuel Myers coined—or at least was the first to bring into the medical lexicon—the…

matters of proportion

When a Roman army under the command of Scipio Aemilianus besieged the city of Carthage in 146 bce, it was the final act of nearly a century of bitter warfare between the two empires. One of the most familiar stories of that war says that when the Romans laid waste to the Carthaginian capital, they also sowed the surrounding fields with salt to ensure that the city could never thrive again. That detail was an invention of writers in later centuries, but it invokes a question modern laws of war are still trying to resolve: How should we regulate the use of the natural environment as a weapon of war? Ancient warfare was never noted for its restraint. Salted fields or not, Carthage was wiped out—its cities razed, its civilian population…

pox americana

In September 1775, less than five months after the opening battles of the American Revolutionary War, the newly formed Continental Army invaded the British Province of Quebec, in modern-day Canada, with three objectives: to persuade French-speaking Canadiens to join the revolutionary cause, to take control of strategically important sea routes, and to drive the British out of Canada. Toward the end of the year two separate military expeditions, led by Colonel Benedict Arnold and Brigadier General Richard Montgomery, two officers in the Continental Army, approached Quebec City from the east and the south, joined forces, and set up camp outside the city. There, more than a thousand exhausted and weakened soldiers, packed into close quarters, lived in squalid conditions—a veritable Petri dish for smallpox infections. By December 31, when Montgomery…